YouTube was launched in February of 2005. Less than two years later, it sold for $1.65 billion; and barely a decade after Mark Zukerberg began developing the idea for Facebook in his Harvard dorm, the site boasted a billion users.

Google, founded a mere 17 years ago, now dominates humanity’s consumption of online information.

WhatsApp was acquired for $19 billion within five years of its initial release, having grown to nearly 500 million users.

In today’s tech economy, “growth hacking” — the rapid launch of new products into the stratosphere — is not only hot, it’s all the rage. However, there is a whole subset of the economy that isn’t even remotely interested in growth hacking and is in fact trying to do just the opposite — to limit expansion. For these businesses, the dilemmas are: to grow or not to grow? And if the answer is to grow, how much growth is good growth? How fast is too fast?

Practically speaking, most business owners aren’t trying to launch the newest Facebook. Sure, they want to make a lot of money, but they aren’t gunning for a multi-billion dollar IPO — just to make a great living and maybe see their families sometimes. They’re wary of expansion because they’re afraid they won’t be able to handle the workload.

What they don’t realize, however, is that “overexpansion” is a myth. It isn’t possible to overexpand. The problem is underorganization, which can be deadly. So, if you want to grow a company, you have to be able to manage that growth. Companies can grow as big and as fast as they wants, so long as they’re organized to handle growth, and so long as their business owners are wicked good at organization.

This is an excerpt of an article I originally wrote for Entrepreneur.com:

Over $500 billion is spent on advertising each year. The average American is exposed to an estimated 3,000 ads per day. Fifteen minutes out of every hour of television programming is devoted to commercials.

That’s a lot of marketing. And a lot of marketers. With six million companies in the United States alone, that’s a lot of people competing to get their message out. How do you stand out from the crowd? How do you get noticed?

This is where branding comes in.

What is branding?

Branding is the art of distinguishing a product or service from its competitors. It’s the term for creating a recognizable “personality” which people will remember and react to.

A company with poor branding is throwing away marketing dollars. Why? Because without a focused message, companies weak in branding are invisible. Nobody remembers them and they blend in. They become just another leaf swirling in the wind, amid all those marketing messages consumers see each day.

In marketing, the point is to actually reach someone, to connect. The way to do this is by focusing attention, not dispersing it.

Discovering your brand

Too often, people try to “dream up” a brand for their company. However, a brand isn’t something you dream up—it’s something you discover. Specifically, it’s something you have to discover about yourself.